Dave Weigel, The Washington Post’s embed in conservative grassroots movements, has resigned this afternoon following an incident earlier this week involving Matt Drudge, the blog Fishbowl D.C., and a private e-mail listserv. Let’s back up. Yesterday, Fishbowl D.C.’s Betsy Rothstein published some missives from Weigel that he had originally sent to JournoList, a large private listserv of pundits, journalists, and political staffers founded by fellow Post colleague Ezra Klein. Eric Alterman’s a member, and so is Jeffrey Toobin! This Rothstein gal had obtained the e-mails through means unknown and decided to publish them, for perhaps she thought this would be some sort of hot scoop. Instead, she was widely castigated for posting the personal messages—it is understood among JournoList subscribers that all correspondence is off-the-record. “I’m leaking that Betsy Rothstein is America’s worst journalist. Hopefully she’ll pick it up for a Fishbowl story,” wrote FireDogLake’s David Dayen on Twitter.

The most salacious of the leaked Weigel e-mails included a harshly worded criticism of Matt Drudge, the famous copy-and-paste auteur behind the Drudge Report. "This would be a vastly better world to live in if Matt Drudge decided to handle his emotional problems more responsibly, and set himself on fire,” wrote Weigel. In another e-mail, he used the word “Paultard” to describe fanatical Ron Paul supporters. Later, Tucker Carlson’s Huffington Post, the Daily Caller, published more e-mails from Weigel in which he made incendiary statements about Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party, and Pat Buchanan, among others. Matt Drudge linked to the story, driving so many readers to the Daily Caller that it eventually crashed. Regarding the situation, Weigel wrote an apology and apologia about the content of the leaked messages on his own blog at The Washington Post. As Politico’s Ben Smith points out in an excellent holistic look at the situation, Weigel has been making mandatory apologies about his views since he began at the paper, which perhaps indicates that the Post was not aware of Weigel’s ideology before he was brought on. “The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he's a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he's liberal is primarily the Post's fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper's brass to put him in an unsustainable position,” Smith wrote.

Unsustainable indeed. Today, Weigel tendered his resignation and the Post accepted. Salon’s Alex Pareene, Slate’s Jack Shafer, and The Nation’s Chris Hayes have all typed tweets of support. “Getting an exceptionally good sense of who my friends are today,” wrote Weigel.